Building American Dynamism | Hacker News Reader

Building American Dynamism

future.a16z.com

"In 2018, I wrote in the Washington Post that startups have begun usurping the responsibilities of governments at breathtaking pace. Whether it was Uber and Lyft supplementing much of public transport in major cities or Palantir assisting in the important work of the U.S. intelligence community, it is becoming clear that government cannot meet the needs of its citizens without the tech sector’s aid. " This doesn't seem quite accurate.

In 1996 America’s top 6 companies included: IBM, Ford, GM and Exxon.

But sure, “not technology”. No “tech” in silly things like automobiles, energy and computer hardware.

Quick, somebody tell A16z that some kind of investment bank that also writes self-congratulatory nonsense blog posts isn't "tech" either.

Exciting tales; however this dynamism needs to learn how not to accidentally capture Governmental duties and generality. Government is of the people, by the people, for the people. Not for the 90% userbase that can be implemented easily in a minimum viable service with lacklustre customer support.

(I don't claim to have any magic ideas about how to make that straightforward in software; it's hard work, really hard - and that is in fact why those same legacy systems move so slowly: they account for the details. a truly visionary, egalitarian approach to technological governance must account for them too, or it may be a false carrot)

Well, OK, I do have one idea:

I think that 95% of the infrastructure of a typical enterprise (source control, continuous integration, (separate) staff and user authentication, cluster management, monitoring, reporting, hosting, legal entity creation, internationalization, payments) should be (and in many cases, already is) standardized, automated and plug-and-play.

Provide that all in a free and open source manner as a complete (and completely tunable) framework, and we'll see truly democratic dynamic innovation.

If it goes well enough (in a Cambrian kind of acceleration), then I think that authentication and access control could be removed entirely. People would keep the services that they want running, running.

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